
Social media is a great fit for brands looking to building longer-term success across a range of promotions all based on building and nurturing online relationships. But what about a situation where you are starting from scratch and only have a tiny time frame to create big results?
This is just the type of challenge we faced when Coke joined forces with MTV to launch a three-week search to find one lucky fan to work with the MTV News crew at the 2009 MTV Movie Awards. Our team leveraged four keys to successfully drive activation in such a short time frame.
1. Be Creative – One of the first steps is to narrow your focus to identify relevant people to target – but don’t limit yourself to the obvious. We knew the top fans of movies, music, and celebrities would be interested, but our team also decided to go after journalism and entertainment job seekers. Unconventional, but it worked!
2. Know Where To Go – Do your homework to find out where they hang out online to develop a multi-pronged plan of attack. Like all of our activation campaigns, The Coke/MTV project began with a full landscaping exercise to narrow down where we should spend our limited time to maximize our results.
3. Track and Optimize – A tight time frame is no excuse to drop best practices like tracking. This campaign covered a wide range of platforms, including blogs, online publications, message boards, job posting sites- and we planned to leverage an array of targeted strategies: Blogger outreach, Twitter account development, dedicated MySpace page, Facebook outreach, and message board outreach/placement. The real time data we received in terms of where our conversions were coming from was critical for us to quickly focus more and more attention on the platforms and communities that were driving the most success for us.
4. Don’t Be Afraid of Hard Work – Despite having the best tools and a solid plan, online activation simply takes a lot of work. You have to have a smart team that is willing to roll up their sleeves and put in the effort needed to get the word out to the right people in the right way. The result of all this effort? The Movie Awards Insider promotion was a great success, with our team exceeding the client’s expectations driving thousands of applications.
Find our more about this promotion, or how we can help support your next promotion, please contact Emily Sobol.